John Mann – Original Review
Note: This review is from 2007
Review by Steve Bennett
Essex boy John Mann is the most perfunctory of corporate compares, drearily trudging through boringly familiar terrain you’ll have heard countless times before.It’s a tired mix of unoriginal pub gags and bog-standard MC lines addressed to the usual audience suspects – taking great pains to find an Australian, for instance, just so he can ask them ‘…and what bar do you work in?’
Then there’s the weak observational material about wanking and shitting, tiresomely repeating the same sort of observations that have been knocking around the less original edges of the circuit for decades.
Topics such as going to the toilets when there’s no lock, or the poo that won’t flush, may be the sort of obvious stuff a newcomer might be excused for covering, but surely not a pro who’s long enough in the tooth to know better. This sort of stuff is as tired and commonplace now as the mother-in-law gag was in the Eighties, before that scene came crashing down under the weight of its own unoriginality.
There’s a myth that this sort of act somehow gives the mainstream audience what they want and expect – but the crowd at the Jongleurs Chortle saw Mann at greeted him with a sort of benign indifference, paying attention but reacting with little more than sporadic titters. It’s pretty much the reaction his forgettable deserves.
Review date: 19 Nov 2007
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
